Stress Testing Service Terminology

Terminology is a set of terms used in a particular area of knowledge. In IT-sphere it is especially bright and rich; due to terminology, software specialists and dedicated testing teams can speak in “common” language understanding each other very good. Before proceeding to stress testing approaches, it’s essential to start from its terminology.

Stress testing as a service or performance testing service belongs to automated testing, simulating the workflow of a certain number of business users on any general (disjoint) resource. For its better understanding, imagine the working process of a modern bank, where all the workers use the same app installed on all the banking servers. The examples can be numerous, including all the spheres of our daily life. Stress simulation is performed due to various tools and techniques. What and how are we going to simulate? First, let’s get familiar with the terminology.

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• Virtual User – is a software process that cyclically performs simulated operations.
• Operation Intensity – is a frequency of operation performance per time unit, in test script is set by the time interval between iterations.
• Loading – is a combined execution of operations on a shared resource.
• Performance – is a number of operations over a period of time (X operations per Y hours).
• Application Scalability – is a proportional growth of performance with the load increase.
• Performance Profile – is a set of operations with specified intensities, derived from a statistic collection or by requirements analysis of a system under test.
• Load Point – is a calculated (or specified by a customer) number of users in groups, performing operations with certain intensities.

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Stress testing evaluates the reliability and stability of the system in terms of exceeding the limits of normal functioning. This type of testing is especially necessary for “mission-critical” software. Usually, stress testing detects the stability, availability and exception handling under a heavy load, system than what is considered correct behavior under normal circumstances.